One of the things I love most about pictures is how they can tell a powerful story.  Some of my favourite pictures are the ones in which you can actually feel the sorrow, hear the laughter.

Can you hear the laughter, feel the joy in the picture above?

The greatest pictures speak volumes.  The saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not without merit.

Using a series of pictures can also be an interesting way to tell a story.  Not like this is anything new, in the cases below, I more or less stumbled upon this by accident.  Obviously this kind of thing can be planned as well, usually the pictures dictate the story.

Sometimes when taking pictures, I might take a series of photos in rapid succession with the intent and hope of catching a fleeting moment that I know will come.   That single image might be a great picture in of itself, but when putting the images together as a series (think a film strip), it also tells a story.

The first time I did this, was with my first child.  She was about five months old.  I wanted to get a picture of her smiling, but at that time, her smile was fleeting, there one split second and gone the next.  So to actually capture the moment, I knew I’d have to take a bunch of rapid pictures.   I did capture the smile, but soon realized putting the series of pictures together would tell more of a story.  I called the series, “The Anatomy of a Smile.”  The entire sequence of pictures lasted just over a second.

One of the pictures alone would be pretty cute and capture what I had intended, but putting the four pictures in a series and including a title, tells more of a story, doesn’t it?

I did this again recently.  Same daughter, though now she’s a little older.  And coincidentally, this time I wanted to capture a smile again, actually more of an impish grin, that we see from time to time.  We’ve been working on her chewing with her mouth closed.  Quite often she’ll tell me to look at her and proudly display her mouth-closed-chewing abilities with that cute smile.  I wanted to capture that smile.  Here’s a picture of the final single image

No, she doesn’t usually wear a hat, a bib and no shirt while eating, but it shows a lot of her character doesn’t it?

As you can see, the picture by itself is a cute moment in time.  But when I include this picture with the other “throw-aways”, it becomes more than just a moment in time, and tells a little story (even if it’s not clear that she’s chewing with her mouth closed).

The first example I put together in Photoshop and the second in Lightroom.  Either example could be printed as a single image and put in a frame.  Many stores also sell frames with for multiple pictures which would  mean your could just print your chosen images and put them directly in the frame.

An interesting way to not only capture a moment in time, but also to tell a story through pictures.